In the embroidery field, a backing material made from a flexible felt or fabric type material is used on the back of the item being embroidered to receive the stitching. The size of the required piece of backing material varies depending on the size of the area receiving the embroidery. The user must cut a piece of backing material of approximately the right size and use it behind the area being embroidered. Thus, there is often a need in this field, as in many others, to cut a square or rectangular piece of material from a bolt or roll of such material.
Prior to this invention, the typical way of cutting a piece of backing material was to pull the material off the roll by hand and to then use a pair of scissors to manually cut the material both widthwise and lengthwise. While effective, this method was time consuming and clumsy. It is difficult to precisely cut the material using only scissors. It is difficult to accurately measure the material before cutting.
Various machines are known from various fields for slitting material provided on rolls. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,827,818 to Stringfellow discloses a machine for slitting felt used as a roofing material. U.S. Pat. No. 3,971,279 to Wright shows a machine for slitting columns of printed text from a roll of paper to use the text columns to paste up a page of newsprint. Wright includes a fixed cutting blade or bar for tearing off the paper at the end of the text columns.
Slitting and cutting machines such as Wright have various disadvantages. For example, they are generally hard to use and adjust. They have no provision for easily and accurately setting or adjusting the slitting knives or for measuring the width and length of the cut pieces. Accordingly, they would not be particularly usefully for cutting pieces of embroidery material, or similar flexible material, where one need is for simplicity and ease of use and another need is for accurately cut pieces of material.